AMD Radeon HD 7770 pictured

We have seen a lot in the news of the upcoming HD 7970 graphics card, which is a very high end card costing nearly $600. Now we get a chance to have a look at a mainstream card from AMD in the form of the HD 7770. Now the X770 model has been rebranded a couple of times with the 5770 and 6770 being identical graphics processors just with a few PCB, BIOS and cooler tweaks. The HD 7770 is new architecture not rebranded architecture which makes a nice change from AMD. It features the new ‘Cape Verde’ core GPU which replaces the ‘Juniper’ GPU used in the HD 5770/6770. Length wise not much has really changed, the card is relatively small in the grand scheme of things measuring in at about 8.25″ in length.

The cooler features the usual AMD colour scheme with a decent sized fan (appears to be 80mm) which blows directly onto the GPU. The specifications of the card are as follows:

Three display outputs, DVI, HDMI and miniDisplayPort

Single Crossfire connector for 2 cards max

The reference PCB has four GDDR5 memory chips, implying a 128-bit memory interface

Single 6-pin PCI-E power connector

Around 100 Watts power consumption

The GPU chip used is actually about 16 mm² smaller than the GPU core on the HD 5770/6770 cards. Judging by the fact it packs only one fan and a smaller core size we would expect this card to pack impressive performance per watt ratios and run much cooler than previous generation cards.